This is the 7th in a series of articles detailing my personal experiences with Internet Marketing.
Of all the avenues for Internet marketing the most important is a back linking strategy. On a basic level the more links pointing to your website from around the net the better for your page rank, search engine indexing and site traffic.
It’s obvious really. As search engine crawlers traverse sites following link after link they will visit your site more often if more inbound links exist. The higher the number of inbound links the more seriously search engines will take your site. Thus having a beneficial effect on your website popularity.
With recent refinements Google is seeking to clarify the service or product a website provides. They will scan keywords and content, compare with inbound links, identify your niche and index accordingly.
The higher the number of relevant inbound links to a page the higher the position in search engine results. This is the general rule. So it’s not just about having tons of inbound links. It’s about having relevant inbound links. Remember it’s also called Page Rank not Site Rank. So we are talking about links to an individual page not the whole site.
Secondly it’s important to link to sites with higher Page Rank than your own. Install the Google Page Rank tool into your browser and each time you surf the net you will know the Page Rank of a website.
Backlinks can be obtained in many different ways. Join forums, create a profile with your url and submit posts. Each post will give you a back link. Search Google for websites or blogs matching your keywords.
On the websites see if they have a link exchange facility. SEO experts will say a reciprocal link is pointless as the links nullify each other. If this is true then it would have no effect on Page Rank. My view is exchange the links. It still helps Google identify your website and could provide a small amount of traffic.
For blogs, read the articles, and post comments. The blog sites should have the ability to display your url.
Submitting links to directories is probably a waste of time these days. But if you find some software which allows you to manually submit to 40 or 50 free directories, then it is worth spend a day on this strategy, but no more.
Of course submitting to Article syndication sites is essential and is one of the first avenues you should set up. Each article will over time create more inbound links to your web pages. RSS Feeds create inbound links for each person who subscribes to the feed.
Social networking sites are growing in importance for link building. Search engines like Bing, Google and Yahoo are all going to index live results from microblogging sites like Twitter.
These sites create a huge number of links each day.
My guess is this is really going to shift the focus of link building more towards relevancy and niche but with recent activity as a new factor. Search engine results will fluctuate from day to day.
At the same time Google have stated that Page Rank should no longer be taken as the ultimate focus of SEO campaigns. Page Rank will still provide authenticity to site visitors and greatly assist link building but I believe search engine results will be more fluid with more recent niche activity appearing higher in results.
I’m going to continue with my back linking strategy as detailed above but gradually I will place more and more emphasize on social networking sites. Plenty of services exist like hulu and ping.fm which can help automate posts into your twitter feed. This is very important and will allow you to spend your time fine tuning your niche back links.
In terms of time spent promoting a website 80% of my time is spent on building back links as this is the path to tons of free organic search engine traffic.
At this moment in time I have not concentrated on online marketing and yet I still have one site, which has been on line just over a year with a Page Rank of 3.
This site has around 30 percent of the links pointing towards the homepage and the remainder towards subdomain links. Only a few of the inbound links come from sites with higher page rank. But 99% of the sites contain relevant niche content. In this case poetry.
I have other sites with lower Page Rank but more traffic from search engines. These sites have more pages indexed and this probably the reason for higher traffic. These other sites also have more inbound links. So why is the Page Rank lower?
My guess is that two factors are effecting Page Rank. These other sites contain inbound links with less relevancy. So not all of them are considered important by the search engine crawlers. The second factor is competition within the niche. I would guess that poetry sites are less competitive than business directory or online marketing sites. Page Rank could be harder to build in highly competitive niches.
